Chicken soup

Tiak made enough chicken soup today for multiple packed meals!

The geography of bus routes

In the 1960s, bus routes could be listed in the newspapers as public service announcements, but not in an infographic or on a map - instead, the stops were named in one long, rambling paragraph, like this listing in 1967:

I wonder how many readers actually made sense of this. Or perhaps it just made sense to the people living or working in the areas mentioned, and that was all that mattered.

It’s a pity that these archaic routes were never accompanied by infographics or maps - the visuals would have been great resources for the study of the geography of transport! For example, the siting of bus stops.

(The Paya Lebar Bus Service was merged with other bus companies in 1971 to form the Associated Bus Services, which merged again with other bus companies in 1973 to form the Singapore Bus Service, the predecessor of SBS Transit today.)

Compare the 1967 listing above with a poster detailing a new bus service, 381, 50 years later:

Credit: Go-Ahead Singapore.

A 1970s advertisement

During my research, I chanced upon this 1971 newspaper advertisement with cute drawings of industrial equipment, an uncommon sight at the time:

I did a cursory check - Tiang Wah Manufacturing is still around today. It does not have an office at Horne Road anymore, but it still has a factory at Jalan Woodbridge, now renamed Gerald Drive. The company has been around since 1967.

I hope it has been coping well during this pandemic.